Czech President says Environmentalism the new communism

Environmentalism, says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, is the new communism, a system of elite command-and-control that kills prosperity and should similarly be condemned to the ash heap of history.

The provocative Mr. Klaus, an economist by training and former prime minister, said in an interview that today’s global warming activists are the direct descendants of the old Marxists who trampled on individual freedoms and undermined free markets in pursuit of a greater good.

“I understand that global warming is a religion conceived to suppress human freedom,” he told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. “It is used to justify an enormous scope for government intervention vis-a-vis the markets and personal freedom.”

The 66-year-old Mr. Klaus was in Washington this week for talks with senior U.S. officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, and to tout his new book, “Blue Planet in Green Shackles,” about the dangers to life, liberty and prosperity posed by the modern environmental movement. [snip]

An admirer of conservative former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he has emerged as a leading voice in Europe for free markets and individual rights. [snip]

Former Vice President Al Gore – whom Mr. Klaus has challenged to a public debate – won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Czech Republic ratified the Kyoto climate treaty seven years ago, but Mr. Klaus insisted he had the world’s “silent majority” behind him in the green debate.

“I don’t feel alone,” he insisted.

Yeah Al, why not debate Global Warming? You won a Nobel Peace Prize for your work on Global Warming, certainly you know enough to debate the man, no? what are you afraid of, hmm?

He rejected the “fashionable” idea of a cap-and-trade pollution control system, endorsed by Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain and his two Democratic rivals, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Under cap-and-trade, the government would set a ceiling under which companies could trade “credits” on how much carbon they produce.

“It’s a scheme to play the market and I refuse to accept that concept,” he said. “Please don’t try to play the market.”

More practically, he said, government bureaucrats will be so afraid of setting the cap too low – stifling all economic activity – that they will set the ceiling too high, making it “meaningless.”

Mr. Klaus pointed to the sharp rise in global energy prices as a sign the market is a far better engine for social change than politicians or bureaucrats.

The recent price increase “is so much more than any government would dare to do,” he said. “Can you imagine if the U.S. Congress tried to introduce such a tax to cut consumption? The Congress would disappear tomorrow morning.” [snip]

Mr. Klaus was a leading figure in the first Prague governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was prime minister when the former Czechoslovakia broke into two countries in the “Velvet Divorce” of 1993.

Global warming is based on junk science and we the people are not causing global warming. In fact, The temperature has no warmed at all since 1998 and now scientyist are saying we are entering a decade of global cooling.